Posts tagged political

You may have noticed that I haven’t been publishing many cartoons lately. That’s because I’m working on two other projects, one is a graphic novel, but the other is The Loch Yes Monster, the second Evil Dr. Aye book. This cartoon features artwork from one of the pages 🙂

I’m getting ready for Dunfermline Comic Con next weekend, there are certain old comics I still like but don’t sell anymore at events as they’re not watercolours. This was one of them, so I gave it a quick watercolour re-edit.

Time to Go was my first proper political webcomic. I drew it the night of the brexit vote being counted as an illustration of what I feared would happen, though I didn’t actually think it would, I shared it on the Scotland subreddit and headed off to bed. I woke up in the morning to find that not only had what I depicted come true, but I also had 10,000 hits on the website overnight.

At the time I’d been creating a webcomic called Evil Dr. Eye for about three months. It featured a main character of a guy with a massive eye for a head, a character I’d actually been drawing in doodles since high school. I was still learning to draw (still am!) and hadn’t really got any kind of audience yet, but after the success of this political comic I decided to head straight into political cartooning from there on. This allowed me to continue doodling these things but also to share my wish for Scotland to be an independent country. Evil Dr. Eye became Evil Dr. Aye.

The original version of this comic featured Evil Dr. Eye playing the part of Scotland. Remember this was just meant to be a one-off thing, I hadn’t considered that I would actually get into political cartoons at this point. The result of this was that the number one comment I saw as the comic quickly went viral, and is still being shared nearly three years later, was “what’s with the creepy eye?!” Well later I switched to watercolours and stopped selling the original digital prints on my stands at comic cons and marches, which meant Time To Go went off sale. I’ve wanted to redraw it in watercolour for a long while now, so here it is, and in doing so I was able to fix the biggest source of confusion, I’ve ditched the Eye and we now have Scotland being represented by this lassy who I feel portrays the role so much better.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me with the last three years of political cartoons, especially those at the Scotland subreddit, while I’m working on other projects these days, I plan to keep putting out political stuff for the foreseeable future. Sometimes I worry that I’ll have nothing to draw for Evil Dr. Aye if we do actually get independence though! We’ll see in time I suppose 🙂

Another one of my Inktober sketches. Day 18’s prompt was “Bottle”. Remember, all of my inktobers appear on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I’m doing them on postcards and the first person to DM an address for each one will receive the postcard!

So this weekend’s cartoon happens to also be the 12th day of Inktober’s prompt, whale. Do follow on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram to make sure you catch all of the rest of the Inktober doodles I’m doing, which I’m doing on Postcards. First DM of an address for each one gets the card.